Platonism and its Legacy. Ed. by J. Finamore and T. Nejeschleba. The Prometheus Trust. 2019. P. 101-120 (original) (raw)

This paper tries to answer the question of what kind of souls Proclus discovered according to the report of his pupil Marinus in Vita Procli 23, 8. Unlike L. J. Rosan (1949), who thought that souls discovered by Proclus were demonic or intelligent ones, I argue that Marinus could have in mind so-called “hypercosmic” souls, that is, high divine souls situated at the beginning of the psychic level of reality immediately after the transcendent Monad of Soul and before the Soul of the World. Hypercosmic souls are called so not because of being entirely free from the physical cosmos, but because of animating immaterial luminous bodies and going thereby beyond the limits of the heavens. As such, these souls belong to the vertical series of the so-called ‘absolute' or ‘hypercosmic-encosmic’ gods, whose distinctive characteristic consists in the ability both to touch the sensible world and to remain above. Although souls of this kind were introduced into Neoplatonism by Proclus’ predecessors, he presumably was the first to discover them in Plato’s Timaeus and to demonstrate their existence, not from his own notions, but the very words of Plato.